Grand jury insists county needs independent ethics commission

ETHICAL SOLUTIONS FOR O.C.

• The grand jury has concluded that the ideal solution for addressing the deficiencies in current ethics and campaign and lobbyist reporting oversight and enforcement is an ethics commission.

• An ethics commission would consist of a body of independent commissioners who adjudicate hearings regarding violations and penalties, and a paid staff, overseen by the commissioners, to carry out all of the duties of the commission.

• These duties would include receiving and investigating complaints, conducting audits, collecting and analyzing consolidated data, providing training, education and opinions, etc. The commission would be a single consolidated body performing the functions now spread among many departments and agencies in Orange County.

• The oldest California ethics commission (in its current format) is the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, established in 1990.

• Only the city of Los Angeles and Kern County provide pay for commission service. The Los Angeles commission provides $50 per meeting. Kern County provides $125 for a half-day, and $200 for a full day.

• Paid staff varies from none in San Jose and Kern County, to 21 in Los Angeles. Commission members are not considered paid staff.

• San Francisco's commission had the highest budget at $4.2 million (including $1.9 million of campaign matching funds).

• Oakland's commission is charged with setting the salaries of city council members.

• All of the commissions the grand jury studied have at least one attorney as an appointed member, since much of a commission's work deals with interpreting and applying laws.

• Legal work is performed either by full- or part-time attorneys on the paid staff, attorneys working as independent contractors, the city attorney, county counsel or volunteer attorneys.

This just in from the “Um,sorry, but we won’t be taking no for an answer!” department:

The grand jury is again smacking around the good County of Orange, insisting that it is woefully deficient in the ethics and transparency arena, and insisting that it enter the 21st century by creating an independent ethics commission to “serve as a check and balance on government officials, employees and candidates.”

Los Angeles has one. San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland, Ventura and San Bernardino have one. But O.C.? The third-largest governmental jurisdiction in California? With a budget of $5.6 billion (of which $3 billion is contracted out)? Nope.

“The Board of Supervisors should place a proposition on the next available general election ballot to establish an Orange County Campaign Reporting and Ethics Commission, similar to commissions in other jurisdictions in California,” the grand jury said.

If you have a strange sense of deja vu, it’s because last year’s grand jury hit on essentially these same points, and was blasted by a highly offended county Board of Supervisors. The county already has “a host of coordinated accountability and oversight mechanisms … for addressing improper behavior,” the supes said, and an ethics commission would be just “another bureaucratic structure at taxpayer expense” that would be “practically unnecessary ... irresponsible and wasteful.”

Ooh! There’s little we at The Watchdog love more than a spitting cat fight over public policy, and this year’s grand jury has its claws out.

“A staff of approximately three to five could hardly be called bureaucratic,” the grand jury fired back in its report released Tuesday. “Would establishment of an ethics body be irresponsible? The Grand Jury finds it hard to understand why uncovering unethical, illegal and corrupt behavior by those in positions of public trust is irresponsible. Indeed, it is irresponsible not to uncover, investigate and prosecute such behavior.

“Would establishing an ethics body be wasteful?” it continued. “The Grand Jury is proposing an estimated expense for an ethics body that is less than 0.01 of 1 percent of Orange County’s total budget.” At no more than $750,000 or so a year, the potential cost is outweighed by the potential benefits, “including coordinated oversight, transparency, independence, and creating an atmosphere of deterrence to law violations and corruption that could contribute to improving overall trust in local government,” the grand jury said.

While the 2013 grand jury chronicled a litany of corruption dating back to the 1970s – citing 43 county politicians indicted from 1974 to 1977 alone, which some supes felt unfairly tarnished those in office today – the 2014 grand jury stuck to the high road, examining what the county now has in place, and how independent ethics panels are structured and operate.

The short version is, there are lots of tentacles in O.C. right now, but no central brain to coordinate action and connect the dots, and little to no enforcement, the grand jury found. A half-dozen different agencies are charged with various bits and pieces of reporting and oversight – the district attorney, the registrar of voters, the clerk of the board, internal audit, the grand jury itself – and none is truly independent of the Board of Supervisors. The supes either appoint these folks or control their purse strings.

To their credit, the supes do understand that adjustments need to be made on the ethics front, and are moving toward engaging the state Fair Political Practices Commission to enforce O.C.’s campaign finance law.

That has several drawbacks, however, the grand jury said: Independence would still be an issue, as supes would have to approve the contract and set the budget; it would be limited to civil – not criminal – enforcement; and it wouldn’t do much to coordinate and control the various tentacles already at work.

Orange County needs a better system, where Average Joes can easily access information, and where the tools and technology that can help detect less-than-honorable behavior are at an independent commission’s fingertips, the grand jury said.

O.C. “is very wealthy, and land and economic development are still very active here,” it argued. “When such robust development and economic activity is combined with the size and scope of government activity in general today, unethical attempts at self-enrichment and increased power tend to follow. ... Such is human nature.”

The supervisors have 90 days to respond to the grand jury in writing. This time, as last time, there are mixed feelings.

Supervisor John Moorlach said he’s worked with his share of politicians whose behavior was questioned – former Sheriff Mike Carona, former Treasurer-Tax Collector Chriss Street, and former public administrator/public guardian John Williams, to just name a few.

“But the grand jury isn’t saying, ‘Here’s the problem we’re trying to solve,’” Moorlach said. “And they apparently don’t feel that they’re able to be the antidote to corruption, or that the D.A. is either. They don’t like the idea that we’re using the FPPC. I don’t know what to say – I’m sorry they’re so frustrated. I sort of wish I could figure out what the frustration is about.”

Supervisor Todd Spitzer, who wrote a dissenting response to the grand jury last year, finds the ideas intriguing.

“I’ve said for a long time we have to have oversight of our politicians in O.C.,” Spitzer said. “As long as you have politicians overseeing politicians, it makes the process political. There are two sides to it: the money side, and the ethics side. I think we bit off half of it with the FPPC overseeing our campaign contributions. It’s an important step. But it’s only half of the equation.”

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